Ancient Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. This web site is my attempt to document, from my perspective, these "interesting times".

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Universal Health Care

The Journal of Health Affairs has a
new study out that says that half of bankruptcies are due to high medical
bills. This is true even of those who have health insurance but even worse for
those who don't.

Now consider this: if someone is uninsured or has poor insurance and then
gets sick or injured and has to go to a hospital, how do they pay for their
care? They often don't. When the hospitals come looking for payment these people
declare bankruptcy as the only viable means of keeping the bill collector off
their backs.

So who ends up paying for the medical costs? The cost gets spread around to
those who can pay, thus raising the medical bills even higher and forcing even
more people into bankruptcy!

And Bush wants us to think the problem is all those evil lawyers and their
medical malpractice lawsuits!

The simple truth of the matter is that universal health care lowers
medical costs by spreading the burden of coverage commensurately throughout the
population. Those who would complain that this means they would have to pay for
other people's health insurance have to pay for it anyway!